A substantial literature suggests that deliberate engagement with extremists or radical environments predicts pro-violence attitudes more strongly than incidental encounters (Clemmow et al., 2022; Gill et al., 2015; Pauwels et al., 2014), and case studies indicate that radicalization typically involves sustained interaction within extremist networks rather than passive contact with propaganda (Malthaner, 2017; von Behr et al., 2013). Yet exposure alone cannot explain why some individuals seek out, or are drawn into, radical environments in the first place. This points to a motivational question: what disposes particular individuals toward deliberate involvement with radical content and actors?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We propose that obsessive passion (OP) is one such motivational vulnerability. OP is a form of ideological commitment in which self-worth becomes contingent on the cause, leading alternative goals to be suppressed and the cause to be defended rigidly when it is threatened (B\u00e9langer et al., 2019b, 2022; Rip et al., 2012); it is also among the more consistent psychological correlates of violent extremism across political and religious groups (Wolfowicz et al., 2021). Crucially, what matters is not the intensity of ideological involvement per se. Harmonious passion reflects a comparably strong commitment yet is not associated with violence. The difference is qualitative rather than one of degree: harmonious passion holds the cause in balance with a person\u2019s other goals and values, whereas OP organizes the self around it. It is this controlled, rigid mode of involvement\u2014not the strength of commitment\u2014that we expect to drive radicalization. We therefore hypothesize that OP, more than harmonious passion, is linked both to deliberate engagement with radical content and to support for political violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This account also makes a claim about direction<\/em> that has rarely been tested. OP has been characterized as a quasi-addictive relationship to a cause, sustained through ego-defensive reactions to threat and deepening immersion in like-minded networks (B\u00e9langer et al., 2020, 2021)\u2014a description that implies a self-reinforcing cycle rather than a one-way path. We take this idea seriously and test it directly. Using longitudinal data, we ask not only whether OP, radical engagement, and support for violence move together, but whether they reinforce one another over time within the same individuals, as a self-reinforcing model of ideological obsession would predict. As we will argue, the evidence fits this self-reinforcing picture better than a linear one: across our studies, obsessive passion, deliberate engagement, and support for political violence behave less like ordered links in a causal chain than like mutually reinforcing facets of a single radicalization syndrome. We use syndrome throughout in its statistical rather than clinical sense: a set of attitudes and dispositions that co-occur and sustain one another. The term implies no pathology, diagnosis, or medicalization of political actors; it names the co-occurrence structure of the phenomenon, not a disorder in the person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Passion for a cause has been defined as \u201ca strong inclination toward a self-defining cause that is loved and valued, and in which people invest a significant amount of time and energy\u201d (St-Louis et al., 2016, p. 263). This definition\u2014loving, valuing, investing in, and prizing the activity\u2014describes the commitment<\/em> that makes an activity a passion in the first place; it is the quantity of motivation. Within this framework, however, not all passions are alike in kind. Harmonious passion (HP) and obsessive passion (OP) are not greater or lesser amounts of commitment but two qualitatively different ways the same passionate commitment can be internalized and regulated relative to other life goals (B\u00e9langer et al., 2019a; Vallerand et al., 2003). <\/p>\n\n\n\n In HP, ideological pursuit is integrated alongside other goals and remains under the person\u2019s control; in OP, it is internalized in a controlled, self-worth-contingent fashion that crowds out competing pursuits (Mageau et al., 2011; Rip et al., 2012). Accordingly, HP tends to be associated with peaceful activism, whereas OP is associated with support for ideological violence across political and religious groups (B\u00e9langer, 2021; B\u00e9langer et al., 2019b). This is the crux of the present account: two people can be equally and intensely committed to an ideology, yet differ sharply in the quality of that motivation\u2014and it is the obsessive quality, not the intensity of commitment itself, that we expect to be linked to radical engagement and support for political violence. Isolating the contribution of OP therefore requires distinguishing the quality it indexes from the shared commitment it rests on\u2014an issue to which we return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Theoretically, obsessive passion for an ideology\u2014what B\u00e9langer (2021) and others term ideological obsession<\/em>\u2014has been characterized as a form of ideological addiction: an overwhelming, self-defining engagement with a cause that persists despite conflict with other life domains and mounting personal cost. Like other addictions, it is understood not as a simple deficit of self-control but as a goal-driven, self-reinforcing process rooted in unmet psychological needs (Adam-Troian & B\u00e9langer, 2024; B\u00e9langer, 2021). This characterization matters for what follows: an addiction framework implies that the relationship between obsessive engagement and support for political violence is reciprocal and self-sustaining rather than strictly one-directional\u2014a possibility we examine directly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two self-regulatory mechanisms have been proposed to link OP to violence. The first is goal-shielding: because self-worth is staked on the ideology, competing goals\u2014and the moral considerations attached to them\u2014are suppressed, loosening ordinary constraints on harmful action (B\u00e9langer et al., 2019b; Shah et al., 2002). The second, and more central to the present argument, is ego-defensiveness. When self-worth is contingent almost entirely on ideological involvement, identity becomes fragile and is readily threatened by disconfirming information, which can heighten hatred and support for violent retaliation (B\u00e9langer et al., 2021; Rip et al., 2012). Notably, this same fragility leads obsessively passionate individuals to seek out and affiliate with like-minded, pro-violence others, who in turn reinforce their commitments (B\u00e9langer et al., 2020). Ego-defensiveness is thus inherently bidirectional in its logic: it disposes individuals toward support for radical, even violent, positions, and that support, once formed, becomes part of a fragile self that must be defended and therefore further entrenched.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These mechanisms have typically been studied as pathways from<\/em> OP to<\/em> radical outcomes. Yet both the addiction framing and the ego-defensive account imply feedback in the opposite direction\u2014that radical engagement and the endorsement of political violence may themselves intensify obsessive passion. Whether OP precedes, follows, or reciprocally shapes radical engagement and violence support is, however, an empirical question that cross-sectional designs cannot resolve, and one we take up in Study 2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clemmow et al. (2022) define exposure to radical content as \u201cexposure to people, places, or settings that promote ideas which characterize extremism as morally legitimate\u201d (p. 334). Although exposure figures as a precursor in many radicalization models (Moghaddam, 2005; Precht, 2007; Sageman, 2008; Wiktorowicz, 2004), its role is more complex than a simple stage account implies: the great majority of those exposed to radical content never radicalize (Gerstenfeld et al., 2003; Keipi et al., 2017; Pauwels & Schils, 2016). Large-scale surveys underscore this disconnect\u2014in a Belgian sample of 6,020 youth, only 2.4% expressed sympathy for extremist organizations<\/a> despite far broader exposure (Pauwels & Schils, 2016)\u2014indicating that exposure alone is neither necessary nor sufficient for radicalization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What appears to matter is the manner<\/em> of exposure. Accumulating evidence links higher and more deliberate exposure to stronger extremist attitudes (Gill et al., 2015; Hassan et al., 2018; Pauwels et al., 2014; Wolfowicz et al., 2022), and active, sought-out engagement predicts pro-violence attitudes more robustly than passive or incidental encounters (Pauwels et al., 2014). Offender-based studies reinforce this distinction: only a small fraction of those exposed to extremist content online progress to terrorism (Binder & Kenyon, 2022), and individuals radicalized primarily online tend to show lower engagement, intent, and capability than those embedded in offline networks (Kenyon et al., 2023). Building on this, Clemmow et al. (2022) proposed the EXPO-12, which distinguishes four putative modes of exposure: active seeking<\/em> (proactively searching for extremist material or groups), active action<\/em> (direct behavioral involvement, such as meeting extremists or seeking weapons information), passive online exposure<\/em> (inadvertent digital encounters), and passive offline exposure<\/em> (unintentional encounters in one\u2019s community). The organizing principle is the intentionality<\/em> of exposure\u2014the degree to which the individual deliberately brings it about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This intentionality dimension is theoretically central, but whether the four proposed subtypes are empirically<\/em> separable\u2014and how cleanly they can be distinguished from the violent attitudes they are meant to predict\u2014is less clear. Some forms of \u201cactive action\u201d (e.g., meeting known extremists, seeking bomb-making information) are highly proximal to violence itself, raising the question of whether they index exposure or already constitute early radical engagement. We therefore treat the structure of the EXPO-12 as an open measurement question, and in Study 1 we examine whether its subtypes are distinguishable across ideological groups before using them to model the relationship between OP and support for political violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How should OP relate to these modes of exposure? The clearest theoretical expectation concerns deliberate<\/em> engagement. Because OP motivates immersion in the cause and the suppression of competing goals, obsessively passionate individuals should be especially likely to seek out radical content, actors, and settings (B\u00e9langer et al., 2020). The expected relationship with incidental<\/em> exposure is weaker and more indirect: to the extent that OP draws individuals into radical-leaning networks and environments, it may raise the ambient likelihood of unsought encounters (homophily; McPherson et al., 2001), but OP is not expected to \u201ccause\u201d incidental exposure in any direct sense. This asymmetry\u2014a strong, direct link to deliberate engagement and a weak, environmentally mediated link to incidental exposure\u2014is the prediction the present research sought to test.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Exposure to radical content is widely treated as a stage linking motivational vulnerabilities to violent extremism, yet exposure alone is a poor predictor of who comes to support violence (Clemmow et al., 2022). The present research asks which form of contact with radical content matters, and for whom. We distinguish deliberate engagement\u2014actively seeking out and immersing oneself in radical people, settings, and content\u2014from incidental exposure, and we examine obsessive passion as the motivational orientation linked to such engagement and to support for political violence. The standard account treats this as a sequence\u2014passion disposing individuals toward engagement and, through it, toward violence\u2014but we do not assume that ordering; whether passion precedes, follows, or reciprocally shapes engagement and violence is among the questions Study 2 is designed to resolve. Study 2 additionally measures identity fusion\u2014the visceral sense of oneness with a group that is obsessive passion’s nearest theoretical neighbor among self-and-group constructs (G\u00f3mez et al., 2011)\u2014both to establish that obsessive passion is empirically distinguishable from fusion and to verify that its dynamics survive controlling for it. Because harmonious passion and ideological commitment can be just as intense, we test whether it is specifically the obsessive quality of passion\u2014not intensity as such\u2014that is linked to radical engagement and violence support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Studies 1A\u2013D test the cross-sectional account across four ideological groups: U.S. Democrats, Republicans, environmental supporters, and Muslims. These groups are not equivalent ideological categories\u2014they differ in social structure, normative standing, and the likely meaning of \u201cpolitical violence,\u201d and a religious identity is not interchangeable with a partisan or activist one. We therefore do not treat them as parallel cases. Rather, their heterogeneity is the point: examining whether the same association recurs across such different ideological contexts provides a stringent test of its robustness and generality, while also allowing us to ask whether the constructs and their measurement function comparably across groups. Before modeling the OP\u2013engagement\u2013violence-support relationship, we therefore examine the measurement structure of the exposure constructs within each sample.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Study 1 is, however, cross-sectional, and cross-sectional mediation cannot establish the temporal or causal ordering it is often taken to imply. Demonstrating that obsessive passion, engagement with radical content, and violence support covary\u2014even consistently, across diverse groups\u2014does not show that passion precedes engagement, or engagement violence, rather than the reverse or some reciprocal arrangement. Study 2 addresses this directly with a three-wave longitudinal study of far-right Americans, using random-intercept cross-lagged panel models to separate stable, between-person differences from within-person change. This design allows us to test not only the hypothesized forward pathway but also the theoretically plausible reverse and reciprocal pathways that the addiction and ego-defensive accounts of obsessive passion imply (B\u00e9langer, 2021), and to do so while controlling for harmonious passion and ideological commitment. For transparency, all data and materials are available on the Open Science Framework (https:\/\/osf.io\/958bh<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Across four ideologically distinct samples\u2014U.S. Democrats (Study 1A), Republicans (Study 1B), environmental supporters (Study 1C), and Muslims (Study 1D)\u2014we examined how obsessive passion relates to exposure to radical content and, in turn, to support for political violence. Before testing these relationships, we examined whether the exposure constructs posited by the EXPO-12 were empirically distinguishable within each sample and how clearly they could be separated from support for political violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Participants in all studies were adults residing in the United States, recruited online through Amazon Mechanical Turk using CloudResearch (Litman et al., 2017). To safeguard data quality, eligibility was limited to vetted workers with a historical approval rating of 90% or higher, and responses were screened using the platform\u2019s built-in quality controls, which flag duplicate IP addresses and inconsistent geolocations and exclude workers previously identified as unreliable. In an independent prescreening survey, participants self-identified as Democrats (Study 1A), Republicans (Study 1B), environmental supporters (Study 1C), or Muslims (Study 1D). Sample sizes were determined a priori: based on prior work (B\u00e9langer et al., 2019b; Pauwels et al., 2014), we anticipated large associations (r<\/em> = .50) among obsessive passion, active action (here reconceptualized as deliberate engagement), and support for political violence, and moderate associations (r<\/em> = .30) involving the remaining exposure types; Monte Carlo simulations indicated that N<\/em> = 120 would provide .80 power for the smallest hypothesized effect\u2014the indirect effect of obsessive passion on support for violence transmitted through a pathway with a<\/em> and b<\/em> paths of r<\/em> = .30\u2014with the larger hypothesized paths powered above .95. This analysis concerns Study 1’s between-person associations; it does not bear on the within-person parameters of Study 2, for which a dedicated sensitivity analysis is reported there. The analytic samples comprised 257 Democrats (136 women, 118 men, 3 other; M<\/em>age<\/sub> = 43.78, SD<\/em> = 12.87), 250 Republicans (129 women, 121 men; M<\/em>age<\/sub> = 43.27, SD<\/em> = 11.74), 264 environmental supporters (126 women, 136 men, 2 other; M<\/em>age<\/sub> = 41.97, SD<\/em> = 11.09), and 153 Muslims (67 women, 86 men; M<\/em>age<\/sub> = 32.81, SD<\/em> = 8.80). Detailed demographics for each sample are reported in Table S1. The research was approved by the Institutional Review Board of New York University Abu Dhabi (protocol 043-2017).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unless otherwise noted, all items were rated on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (not agree at all<\/em>) to 7 (very strongly agree<\/em>). Full item wording for all measures is provided in the Supplementary Materials. Means, standard deviations, and correlations are presented in Table 1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Table 1<\/strong>Ideological Obsession<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Exposure to Radical Content<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Present Research<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Study 1<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Method<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Participants<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Procedure and Measures<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Means, Standard Deviations, and Correlations Among Study 1 Variables<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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